Is Darwin's Theory Of Evolution True? Part Two

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“As ridiculous as it may seem, the pictures are themselves faked. Peppered moths do not land on tree trunks in nature; they light on the undersurface of small horizontal branches higher in the trees. One researcher (Cyril Clarke) noted that in 25 years of observation he had only seen one peppered moth on a tree trunk. So where did the pictures of peppered moths on tree trunks come from? Dead moths were glued or pinned to the tree trunks. This fact has been known since about 1980, and still the faked pictures are being published in textbooks as proof of evolution.”
 
No, it doesn’t seem ridiculous. Scientists were among the skeptical, even among more modern evolutionsists. However, that’s seemingly been put to bed with proper experimental research. (or at least, the original conclusions, which weren’t scientifically rigorous enough, were confirmed with better scientific process):

Michael Majerus - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
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It has nothing to do with evolution, but it does have some implications that at least favors the concept of evolution, the fact that we share genetic similarities. That, at the very least, suggests a relationship of sorts.

Some would like to argue that the first person was uniquely created from the dirt. But the genetic evidence suggests that we were made from animal parts.
 
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You can believe what you want. But this is a Catholic message board so Church teaching cannot be left out.
 
edwest211 said:
You can believe what you want. But this is a Catholic message board so Church teaching cannot be left out.
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I find that offensive, because the fact of the matter is the catholic authority allows for that interpretation. And since you are not the Catholic authority i think i can safely ignore you on that point.

“Even though our material bodies may be the product of evolution, the Catholic Church holds that our immaterial and immortal soul, which makes us truly human, is directly imparted by God. Pope John Paul II stated in his 1996 address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, “If the human body takes its origin from pre-existent living matter, the spiritual soul is immediately created by God.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church (#366) also states that "every spiritual soul is created immediately by God.”"
 
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That is false.

"Vienna - EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was “more than just a hypothesis,” defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance – or at least acquiescence – of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith.

"But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things.

"Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense – an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection – is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

"Consider the real teaching of our beloved John Paul. While his rather vague and unimportant 1996 letter about evolution is always and everywhere cited, we see no one discussing these comments from a 1985 general audience that represents his robust teaching on nature:

“All the observations concerning the development of life lead to a similar conclusion. The evolution of living beings, of which science seeks to determine the stages and to discern the mechanism, presents an internal finality which arouses admiration. This finality which directs beings in a direction for which they are not responsible or in charge, obliges one to suppose a Mind which is its inventor, its creator.”

"He went on: “To all these indications of the existence of God the Creator, some oppose the power of chance or of the proper mechanisms of matter. To speak of chance for a universe which presents such a complex organization in its elements and such marvelous finality in its life would be equivalent to giving up the search for an explanation of the world as it appears to us. In fact, this would be equivalent to admitting effects without a cause. It would be to abdicate human intelligence, which would thus refuse to think and to seek a solution for its problems.”

"Note that in this quotation the word “finality” is a philosophical term synonymous with final cause, purpose or design. In comments at another general audience a year later, John Paul concludes, “It is clear that the truth of faith about creation is radically opposed to the theories of materialistic philosophy. These view the cosmos as the result of an evolution of matter reducible to pure chance and necessity.”
 
"Naturally, the authoritative Catechism of the Catholic Church agrees: “Human intelligence is surely already capable of finding a response to the question of origins. The existence of God the Creator can be known with certainty through his works, by the light of human reason.” It adds: “We believe that God created the world according to his wisdom. It is not the product of any necessity whatever, nor of blind fate or chance.”
  • Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal and archbishop of Vienna, was the lead editor of the official 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church.
 
Being honest requires reading the entire two posts. Materialistic evolution is to be rejected. From Communion and Stewardship:

“Any evolutionary mechanism that is contingent can only be contingent because God made it so. An unguided evolutionary process – one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence – simply cannot exist because “the causality of God, Who is the first agent, extends to all being, not only as to constituent principles of species, but also as to the individualizing principles…It necessarily follows that all things, inasmuch as they participate in existence, must likewise be subject to divine providence” (Summa theologiae I, 22, 2).”

“It follows that the message of Pope John Paul II cannot be read as a blanket approbation of all theories of evolution, including those of a neo-Darwinian provenance which explicitly deny to divine providence any truly causal role in the development of life in the universe.”
 
The bottom line is that insofar as what i said in the post that you responded to, the Cardinal has indirectly affirmed that it is not against church teaching by saying it might be true.

You can either acknowledge that or ignore it. It is up to you.
 
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Its an argument for common ancestry which is in itself support for the theory of evolution.
 
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Surely you jest. A designer can use common basic building blocks over and over at their discretion.
 
“Ender said:
LeafByNiggle said:
You can hypothesize that all needed adaptations are built in to the genome fully developed, but there is no evidence that it is.
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Considering that 98% of human DNA is considered “junk” (non-coding) perhaps it is safer to wait until we know more before ruling out this possibility.
Science has not “ruled out” that possibility, and neither have I. I just said there is no evidence for it. In science we do not hypothesize things for which there is no evidence.
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No one has ever found the information in the cell for a complex adaptation before it was ever needed. HGT can make it appear that the info was built-in, but no one has proven that an adaptation was pre-programmed before any organism anywhere needed it.
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In the experiment where bacteria were genetically modified so that the segment used to make the flagella was disabled, within four days they had evolved (?) a new way to create the flagella by re-purposing another switch normally used to control nitrogen levels to build the flagella instead.
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It is unknown whether the mechanism by which flagella reappeared was anything like the mechanism that developed flagella in the first place. There is every reason to believe that our artificial gene editing did not fully erase the fruits of millions of years of evolution in “destroying” the capability to make a flagella. Rather we likely just disabled a simple switch and the cell either evolved or just used a pre-existing repair mechanism to re-establish the flagella. It would be unwarranted to assume that this repair of a switch was just as difficult as the initial evolution of the flagella.
That’s not quite the scenario you discussed, but it is an interesting adaptation that they were able to create an alternate method of creating a structure vital to their survival.
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Except that it most likely was not an “alternative way” but a repairing of the same way whose coding was still there.
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